SQLBits 18 Developer Conference

Simultaneous recording of 12 lecture theatres.

Brief

SQLBits is the largest SQL Server conference in Europe and allows data professionals to participate in training by global specialists. Due to the large number of lectures on offer, Stream7 were commissioned to simultaneously capture all the lectures so that they can be watched back On Demand after the event.

The event was hosted at Olympia in London, where the pure scale of the event became the biggest challenge. The event comprised of 12 custom built rooms that would host lectures, and each room would have a full schedule of lectures running concurrently. Our brief was to simultaneously record a live camera and a feed from the presenters laptop from each room over the 2 day event.

Solution

Our solution was to provide 4 tricasters and Tricaster Operators with each Tricaster simultaneously recording four rooms. Stream7 also provided 12 camera operators to operate the camera in each room, along with our project manager that made a crew of 17 heading down to London.

The flexibility of the tricaster enabled us to create a composition showing both the live video of the presenter and the feed from the presenter’s laptop. The lecture title and presenter name were also added to the composition.

Due to the fact that some of the rooms quickly filled to capacity, FTAV - SQLBits’ AV supplier, provided four large screens and wireless headphones so that delegates could watch from the main exhibition space. Using NDI IP Video technology, Stream7 were able to provide a video feed over the network to the screens so that any of the rooms could be shown.

Result

The two day event produced over 140 hours of recordings totaling 5Tb of raw data. Our media management workflow allowed us to transfer the recordings from each Tricaster and catalogue them. These were then quickly trimmed and uploaded to the client’s server for On Demand viewing.

By creating the compositions of live camera and laptop feeds live, the time taken for post production was greatly reduced to a few days as opposed to months using traditional filming and editing techniques.